Epic Abstraction: Friedel Dzubas in the 1970s

EPIC ABSTRACTION | FRIEDEL DZUBAS IN THE 1970S

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EPIC ABSTRACTION | FRIEDEL DZUBAS IN THE 1970S AN EXHIBITION IN HONOR OF HIS CENTENNIAL 1915-2015

April 9 – May 9, 2015

525 WEST 26TH ST NEW YORK NY 10001 212.695.0164 LORETTAHOWARD.COM

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To experience high art all you need is a hunger for better things, for great things, a hunger for being touched, for being moved. Perfectly unexpected, great. A hunger for larger experiences that we in our lonely souls…feel; a larger thing touching us, and at that moment we become the larger thing, that instant; that’s the way it is. We are touched by something outside of ourselves that is larger;​and we are equally as large. It’s a great feeling; it’s a little ecstasy.

Friedel Dzubas, Lecture, Emma Lake Workshop, 1979

by Patricia Lewy Gidwitz

The optical power and emotional charge of Friedel Dzubas’s paintings from the 1970s hold the eye and quicken the senses. The sheer boldness of Dzubas’s vision—a contestation between color and image—proceeds from the deftness with which he shapes and deploys tesserae of saturated color across vast expanses. Luminescence and hue, image and surround, catalyze an allover visual expressiveness of immense vitality.

Even as Dzubas is associated most often with the group of artists known collectively as “color field” painters, among them Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, and Kenneth Noland, he forged a distinctive style for reasons both of age and background. Born in Berlin one hundred years ago (20 April 1915), Dzubas emigrated from Germany to America in 1939 amid escalating racial tensions in Nazi Germany. After a peripatetic half de-

Friedel Dzubas in his studio, 1975 photograph by Phyllis Boudreaux

cade working in a variety of menial jobs and also as a graphic designer at the magazine publisher ZiffDavis in Chicago, Dzubas finally settled in Manhattan on

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10th Street in 1945, supporting himself

a fiercely independent artist, recog-

as a commercial illustrator for various

nized their parallel struggle in their

book publishers. Although young-

work “to sustain conviction…. No one

er by more than a decade, he be-

enjoys being alone.” Yet the personal

friended Clement Greenberg in 1948

generosity between them was ex-

and mixed with Willem de Kooning,

pressed the moment she created

Adolf Gottlieb, Robert Goodnough,

Mountains and Sea. “I got up on a

and Jackson Pollock, who inspired

ladder after I made the picture, and

Dzubas with a freeing yet isolating

looked down at it, and called Friedel

sense of American individualism. “In

who was in his ‘half’—we had a di-

America you rise and fall with what

vider—to take a look. We were both

you have built yourself—[with] your

sort of amazed and surprised and in-

very own and solitary tradition and

terested…. Friedel got on [the phone]

presence, with your own subjective system of values. And you are alone.”

Helen Frankenthaler and Friedel Dzubas photographer unknown

This sense of isolation extended Dzubas’s aesthetic distance from so-called “color field” painters. For even as Dzubas shared a studio with Frankenthaler in 1952, the year of her break through to soak-stained painting, each had been working independently across a curtained “divide,” first on gestural, calligraphic canvases and then on to open fields of color that would characterize the new trend in painting. Frankenthaler,

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Helen Frankenthaler Mountains and Sea, 1952 Oil and charcoal on canvas 86 5/8 x 117 1/4 inches collection: Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York, (on extended loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) © 2015 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

various styles. During the 1940s, Dzubas had mastered gouache-like watercolors that featured wet into wet frankly figurative or allusive images in diffuse expressionistic markings.

Oil paintings from the 1950s show him adept at loose linearity and painterly gesture. By the 1960s, Dzubas had in his own words “cleaned out his vocabulary” by creating exquisitely rendered clean-edged pools of discrete chroma that responsively abut or overlap within the surrounding white force field.

Untitled, 1953 Oil on canvas 79 x 52 inches

following pages 6-7 Procession, 1975 Magna acrylic on canvas 116 x 294 inches

By the 1970s, Dzubas’s canvases have exploded into processions and ebulliently told [Clem] to come

of color shapes—great phalanxes of

over and look at the picture I’d just

contrasting hues that travel across

made…. Friedel helped me to staple it

the surface with unparalleled direc-

to the wall, and Clem encouraged me

tional force. What catalyzed this salvo

to go ahead and make more. I did.”

were repeated sojourns to Europe

Dzubas had been stunned by the

undertaken in the late 1960s and that

daring sense of freedom with which

continued to his death in 1994. There,

Frankenthaler and others forged their

Dzubas re-established family ties in

mature artistic statements. In con-

Berlin as well as forged artistic ones in

trast, Dzubas abandoned himself to

various cities, among them Würzburg

the slow process of working through

and Padua. Apprenticed at the age of

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fifteen to a decorations firm, Dzubas’s formal training had consisted primarily in learning the art of fresco painting.

As he wryly put it, “It was the only way to get close to a pot of paint.” During the 1960s and 1970s, Dzubas rediscovered heroic and spiritual allegories depicted in dynamically composed fresco and oil paintings from Titian and Paolo Veronese to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, along with the essential “flatness” he identified in Giotto’s groupings—“animated,” he averred, “[with] modeled blue background.”

Such excavations stimulated Dzubas

of Boston, his first impulse was to

to bring this historic specular tradition

produce a fresco, “to outdo Giotto

forward into contemporary painting:

[by] putt[ing] in everything I knew

“Thinking also of certain exuberant

and felt for better or for worse” into

eighteenth century proclamations of

that work. “It felt right and good. A

… ideas in ceiling and fresco painting,

gut reaction, not intellectualization.”

I believe in the possibility of an equally

Because there were no fresco ar-

elevating expression in the language

tisans available and the weight of

of today and nourished by the spirit of

such a work as well as the prohibi-

the past.”

tive expense, Dzubas decided on

When in 1973, he was commis-

a painting of vast proportions. The

sioned to design a 13½ by 57½ foot

process of creating this monumen-

long artwork for the Shawmut Bank

tal composition is documented in

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Max Pechstein Horse fair in Moritzburg, 1910 Oil on canvas 27 1/2 x 39 inches Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

photographs showing Dzubas at

the modello on a low easel or shelf,

work on the floor of his Boston stu-

and with paint brush in hand follow

dio. Cleaving to a tradition centu-

the color scheme he had designed—

ries old, Dzubas worked from small

as can be seen in the photo of the

sketches (or modelli) that he would

artist transferring the acrylic sketch

scale up to gargantuan size. After

of this work, Crossing, 1975, to a

tacking a canvas to the floor, ap-

larger-scaled canvas.

plying gesso layers, and measuring

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo Perseus and Andromeda, 1730 Oil on paper affixed to canvas 20 3/8 x 16 inches The Frick Collection, NY

Unlike

Louis,

Frankenthaler,

and loosely marking his shapes, he

and Noland whose early goal was

would array his cans of paint, prop

to achieve a surface at one with its materials—like “dyed cloth,” as Greenberg wrote—Dzubas did not stain his canvases. Rather he used the chalky dense white of as many as three layers of gesso to inflect his colors with a contre jour effect, embedding a luminescence that would be revealed by “fading out” his edges.

To achieve a flat continuous surface, Dzubas painted thin with a mineralbased acrylic called Magna, which was first developed by Sam Golden and Leonard Bocour in the 1940s.

What appealed to Dzubas was that Magna provided the fullest saturation available at the time, while holding its color when thinly applied. Nearly as

following pages 10-11 Nebel, 1971 Magna acrylic on canvas 78 1/2 x 195 inches

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fluid as oil paint, the resin compound added resistance. “It doesn’t let itself be pushed around that easily.”

Magna, then, allowed Dzubas to manipulate his pigments into forms that meld with, even as they resist their material surrounds.

In moving from his hard-edged discrete fields of color to an overall chromatic expanse, the white ground that defined the arena within which Dzubas’s forms and hues had operated in the 1960s opens onto fields of color. We see this in Nebel, where

inner light is almost suppressed, is

a shadowy mist-like surface evokes

embedded in a lightly scumbled pur-

the sense of a “Nebel,” the German

ple and off-white area. The sense of

word for fog. As he did with the white

an emerging scene peering through

fields, Dzubas uses the faintly purple

the overall mist cannot be denied. In

and brown as arenas within which

Nebel, Dzubas works through a cru-

to place indeterminate “imagery,” as

cial exploratory phase in which ele-

he would say, having become by the

ments from his aesthetic past evolve

early 1970s more and more “aware of

into a new fully achieved style.

color adjacent to color.” Here, color

Dzubas’s titles can be impres-

replaces the white as the actor, so to

sionistically suggestive or specifically

speak, and the contrasts that Dzubas

imagistic: they bring to mind real world

sets up burgeon: a dark, frankly matt

encounters—with

grouping of rectangular blocks, where

landscapes, personal events, or cul-

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weather,

natural

Morris Louis Gamma Alpha, 1960 Magna acrylic on canvas courtesy of Loretta Howard Gallery © Maryland Institute College Of Art / Artists Rights Society, NY

chromatic bands seem to conjure the rising wind and succeeding precipitation, while the umber surround may imply the residual “rain shadow”—the dry area in the Föhn’s aftermath.

Klingsor’s Summer, an explosive canvas from 1977, is another prime example of Dzubas’s referential titling. With a title based on Hermann Hesse’s novel Klingsor’s Last Summer about an expressionist painter in crisis, Dzubas disposes his color shapes in contrasting groupings of both hue and palette. Warm horizontal rectangles, their edges softened, are pitted against cooler Sartoris, 1963 Oil on canvas 90 x 61 inches

following pages 14-15 Chenango, 1973 Magna acrylic on canvas 46 x 172 inches

tural artifacts. With Foen, diagonally

vertical shapes, while a pale yellow

tipped horizontal blazes of color surge

central perpendicular form mimes its

across a vast expanse of scumbled

opposing reversed mirror shape in

pigment. Here, Dzubas simulates the

warmer earth tones. Both warm and

environmental force of a vast wind-

cool colors are then lightened with

swept mountainscape, literally the

white or shaded into blue-green or

Foen (Föhn, German)—the warm, yet

umber and painted in as surrounds.

dry masses of air that sweep through

Dzubas shaped these color disper-

the Alpine regions of Germany, which

sions into fields of extraordinary en-

bring with them sudden precipitation

ergy, in what Clement Greenberg

and rising temperatures. Streaks of

described as a “malerisch” manner,

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which the critic equated with “paint-

intervallic progression can be seen,

erliness,” or “loose, rapid [paint] han-

for example, in Chenango, where

dling.” Dzubas’s facture transmits evi-

musky hues alternate with high-

dence of such painterliness through-

keyed tones and a play between

out as do both the mottled daubing of

light and dark sets up optical pat-

his surrounds and the “wash[ed]-out”

terns that seem to extend to infinity.

edging of his tessarae. This is a ma-

Yet Dzubas folds these Baroque

jor element that separates Dzubas’s

compositional elements into contem-

art from that of his contemporaries.

porary abstraction by placing them

Recognizing the contrast between

within an unbroken, non-illusionistic

his paintings and those of Louis,

shallow space that rarely breaks the

Frankenthaler, and Noland, with a sly

two-dimensionality of his surfaces.

wink Dzubas acknowledged that his

His images are not volumetric or

“wash-outs” seemed to “violate the

modeled, nor are they meant to be.

‘Holy Grail.’ But evidently, I couldn’t

With no foreground or background,

help myself, and I stuck to these little

Dzubas hews close to a key goal in

painterly touches.”

“color field” painting—to preserve the between

integrity of the two-dimensional pic-

Dzubas’s paintings and their historic

The

relationship

ture plane. As the artist emphatically

models is made evident by Wölf-

stated, “Everything was kept on the

flin’s description of Baroque art:

surface, everything was very much

“rich groupings” of figures arrayed in

forward, very much front.”

“lively variations in axial directions.”

What clearly distinguishes Dzubas,

By alternating hue, value, and im-

then, from the emerging stylistic trend

age placement, Dzubas creates an

of “post-painterly” or “color field”

underlying intervallic structure and a

painting is the influence of European

continuously shifting focal point. This

technique and compositional struc-

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Casper David Friedrich Drifting Clouds, c.1820 Oil on canvas 7 1/4 × 9 5/8 inches Kunsthalle, Hamburg

ture. All major critics of Dzubas’s work

artist. “That [color] was very exciting.

call attention to the artist’s European

Because color is an emotional thing;

background to account for what

it’s a highly emotional thing, you know,

they see as a romantic element at

and it seemed to me, these people

work, particularly in canvases from

not only spoke directly, they felt di-

the 1970s. Dzubas himself refers to

rectly. There was passion.” But it is the

an

romanticizing”

contemporary critical contention that

tendency in his early work and points

these elements continue to undergird

to the “brooding quality” and “ideal-

his later, bold colorscapes from the

ization of loneliness” in Caspar David

1970s, with their roiling painterly sur-

Friedrich, along with “the unheard

faces, massed dynamic shapes, and

brashness of color” in the paintings of

expressive coloration.

“expressionistic,

Die Brücke artists, which impressed

Dzubas releases the expressive

him as an eighteen-year-old Berlin

force of color to evoke historical largescale grandeur, to satisfy “a hunger for larger experiences,” and perhaps, to provide “a little ecstasy.” The sheer fullness and richness of his large-scale 1970s work reflect the size and scale of the artist’s own history. In Frank Stella’s wonderfully apt and intelligent formulation, “Friedel was a ‘natural,’ very comfortable with paint. Early watercolors, decorative house painting, and commercial illustration all came together for him. The ‘materiality’ of his era was duck soup for him.”n

following pages 18-19 Klingsors Summer, 1977 Acrylic on canvas 54 x 154 inches

following pages 20-21 Foen, 1974 Magna acrylic on canvas 84 x 206 inches

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This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition EPIC ABSTRACTION | FRIEDEL DZUBAS IN THE 1970S AN EXHIBITION IN HONOR OF HIS CENTENNIAL 1915-2015

Friedel Dzubas in his studio, photograph by Phyllis Boudreaux

April 9 – May 9, 2015

ISBN:0-9842804-9-9

Loretta Howard Gallery 525 West 26th Street New York NY 10001 212.695.0164 www.lorettahoward.com

All works by Friedel Dzubas photographed by John Small and Richard Walker Design: HHA design

Special thanks to Jim Walsh and Mark and Barbara Golden

cover: Procession (detail)

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